Animal Spirits Podcast - Talk Your Book: Marketing is Everything with Seth Godin

Episode Date: October 24, 2024

On today's show we talk with Seth Godin about his new book, This is Strategy, along with why everyone is in sales, how to produce good content, how to define your audience, how to avoid procrastination, marketing for introverts and much more. Thanks to Wealthbox for sponsoring this episode! Wealthbox® is a CRM platform for financial advisors. Integrated with leading custodians and wealthtech partners, Wealthbox is known for its modern product design and powerful yet intuitive user experience. The collaborative workspace technology allows financial advisors, enterprise RIA firms, and broker-dealers to manage client relationships and streamline operations to grow their practices. Learn more at: https://www.wealthbox.com/ Find complete show notes on our blogs... Ben Carlson’s A Wealth of Common Sense Michael Batnick’s The Irrelevant Investor Feel free to shoot us an email at [e-mail] with any feedback, questions, recommendations, or ideas for future topics of conversation.   Check out the latest in financial blogger fashion at The Compound shop: https://www.idontshop.com Past performance is not indicative of future results. The material discussed has been provided for informational purposes only and is not intended as legal or investment advice or a recommendation of any particular security or strategy. The investment strategy and themes discussed herein may be unsuitable for investors depending on their specific investment objectives and financial situation. Information obtained from third-party sources is believed to be reliable though its accuracy is not guaranteed.   Investing involves the risk of loss. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be or regarded as personalized investment advice or relied upon for investment decisions. Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson are employees of Ritholtz Wealth Management and may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this video. All opinions expressed by them are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. The Compound Media, Incorporated, an affiliate of Ritholtz Wealth Management, receives payment from various entities for advertisements in affiliated podcasts, blogs and emails. Inclusion of such advertisements does not constitute or imply endorsement, sponsorship or recommendation thereof, or any affiliation therewith, by the Content Creator or by Ritholtz Wealth Management or any of its employees. For additional advertisement disclaimers see here https://ritholtzwealth.com/advertising-disclaimers. Investments in securities involve the risk of loss. Any mention of a particular security and related performance data is not a recommendation to buy or sell that security. The information provided on this website (including any information that may be accessed through this website) is not directed at any investor or category of investors and is provided solely as general information. Obviously nothing on this channel should be considered as personalized financial advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any securities. See our disclosures here: https://ritholtzwealth.com/podcast-youtube-disclosures/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing. Join Michael Batnik and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Redholz wealth management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions. Clients of Gridholds wealth management

may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Welcome to Animal Spirist with Michael and Ben. My co-ist, Michael couldn't make it today, but I do have a very special guest. He's an author, blogger, entrepreneur, speaker. Probably a few more things. Seth Godin.

Thanks much for being here. Thanks, Ben. It's great to see you. I've been reading your stuff for years and years and years and listening to your talks and as a fellow content producer I'm not nearly as prolific as you

but I write a blog, I do a podcast, YouTube channel, all that stuff. I'm always impressed with the amount of content that you're able to produce. I know it's not easy, writing religiously. What, 20 plus books at this point? So far, so good. Okay, the daily blog post.

People ask me all the time, how do you constantly come up with content? I'm not going to ask you that. But I do want to know how did writing become this medium for you that you do on a regular base? It's just me. I have no assistance, no help. And my high school yearbook, my English teacher wrote, you are the bane of my existence and you will never amount to anything. And in college

I took exactly one English class. What I found is that talking clearly and being able to explain myself was a useful way to help bend the system, to help show up to make a difference. And writing, for me, is just writing down what I say. So what I say to people who are challenged by writing is learn to talk better and then write that down. And I was lucky enough to work with Isaac Asimov at the beginning of my career and the end of his career. He published 400 books. And what he taught me is every morning I sit at this typewriter and I have to type for five hours. It doesn't have to be good.

I just have to type. and he said, if you do that, no matter how hard you try, some good stuff is going to slip through. Yeah, I like that. I looked at my WordPress draft folder the other day. I have 300 unpublished blogs on there that I started writing and they were, I just didn't want to put them out in the world, but I think even bad, I think it's kind of a muscle that you can improve upon. So I was going to ask you this. You've done a lot of TED talks and presentations. I'm curious if writing makes you a better talker or vice versa. Is it both? Because I started blogging first and then I got into, the podcasting thing. And it was hard for me. I'm not a natural speaker. Some people I think just have that. I don't. And it took practice for me to become a better writer. It took practice for me to become a better talker as well. Do you think that those two go hand in hand? Public speaking is not the same as talking. And I find that my books, I don't like being a hypocrite. I don't think most people do. And so I think my books make me better. I write sometimes aspirationally and say,

I'd like to become this archetype that I'm talking about. So I try to live up to that. Public speaking is a craft unto itself. Public speaking is way more about the pauses and the interactions you have in the invisible space between you and the audience than it is about the text. Because if it's just about the text, why don't you just send everybody an email and stay home? Right. I have never really loved giving speeches and it's something that I've had to grow to love.

and it's something that I think, again, you can get better at. But once you, I know, I get this feeling I know why comedians love getting up on stage and getting the sense of the crowd, because once you figure out that you have a good story that hooks people in or maybe a good quip or joke and you've used it a few times and you know what's going to work, that is the best feeling, isn't it? When people, you feel that connection with the audience, there's nothing like that. It's true. I haven't been on a plane for work in four years and I miss that feeling because I do virtual

talks all the time. But when you're doing a virtual talk, you're all after. effect changes because you're talking into the ether and nothing's coming back. Yes, I agree. That was a weird thing to get used to during the COVID period for me. So when I was tasked with writing my first book, I talked to a more established author to get some advice. And he said, listen, don't try to reinvent the wheel. You've already written the book. You've been writing your blog for years. Take the best of what you've written on your blog. Organize it, make it more coherent. That's your book. Do you use your blog as a starting point and as a jumping off point for your books? Okay, so I don't think of myself as a

content creator. I think of myself as a teacher. And I used to write books for a living, but I don't do that anymore. I write a book when I have no choice. So I'm not saying, oh, what material do I have, how can I turn it into a book? What I'm saying is this material demands to be a book. Even though a blog post will reach 10, 20 times as many people. A book, you know, the new book, This is strategy, exists so that people will have a conversation about strategy. Because if you hand someone a book, they have to respond to it in some way. Whereas when a blog post or a tweet or a TikTok lands, you can just go on to the next one. And I have done several collections of my blog posts. And what I have found is that they're good for my sense of longevity and knowing that there's

going to be a thing on a bookshelf. But most people don't go out of their way to buy a collection of blog posts. I love the new book. One of the things I love about it is I really love short digestible chapters, right? And this book feels like it's kind of a series of short blog posts. And what I love about it is, as an, I'm an investor guy. So I'm constantly preaching the benefits of diversification. And I feel like your book is diversified in that there's wisdom and teaching, but there's also stories and anecdotes and history and examples and almost like many case studies on businesses. Where do you get all this from? Is it just experience? Is it reading? Are you constantly jotting these things down? How do you take all this because you weave these

stories and they're different stories as well? So how do you put it all together and get all these things from these different places? So if I see something in the world and I don't understand, it. I can't just walk by. I need to understand how a refrigerator works, and I need to understand why that stock just went up when there's no good reason for it, right? I come up with an explanation. I don't have the time or energy to make sure every one of my explanations is correct, but at least it's interesting. And my explanations become blog posts. That's where the blog comes from. I saw something that didn't make sense, I try to explain it. And the stories come from once I start down a path of trying to explain things to people, I look for things in the world. I don't know

if that thing is going to be the story I'm looking for, but I know there's a story there. And sometimes I will write a whole section because I found a story, not vice versa. One of the things that you've taught me over the years is the fact that marketing is everything and how that is more important than ever these days. It's the work you do, getting a raise, getting a new job, getting a promotion, starting a new project, anything, I guess finding a spouse, you're constantly marketing yourself, whatever you do. It took me far too long in my career to realize this.

I am not the natural salesman, right? The story of the guy who could sell a ketchup popsicle to a woman wearing white gloves. That is not me. I have some people that I work with who are those, they just seem like they're born with it. And I'm not saying they don't work, but I am an introvert at heart. And someone once told me a while ago that blogging is sales and marketing for introverts. I think that's why I first started blogging in the first place, because I feel like I had something to say, I didn't know the right medium for it.

So I started that more than a decade ago. So what advice do you have for people who are like the younger version of me who are introverts with an aversion to sales? And that's such a big part of everything you do. It's going to be a long time before I get the story of the ketchup popsicle out of my head. That was beautiful. Thank you. Okay. I think we need to be really clear about what the words mean because they're getting in the way. Sales is not hustle. Sales is not pushing something onto something. That's what I always thought. That was my problem, is the used car. Like, I don't want to be that. Right. Well, that's not sales. That's a different thing that some people call sales. And so the catch-up popsicle guy isn't our avatar for a good salesperson. Good salesperson simply creates the conditions for somebody to get what they want. because they allow them to feel comfortable going ahead to get what they want.

And marketing is not spam and marketing is not a commotion. Marketing is a bigger, more universal version of sales. Marketing is how do we tell a true story that spreads? How do we create the conditions for people to find what they are looking for? So a great marketer and a great salesperson is sort of of invisible. You don't notice that Patagonia is doing marketing. You just say, well, I love Patagonia stuff. Well, yeah, but the reason you love Patagonia is because Rose and other people did an enormously powerful job of marketing, right? When we say something sells itself,

well, no, what really happens is a marketer had enough empathy to bring the right thing to the right people. So many of the people I see in the green room, TED speakers and stuff, are introverts. I left to my own devices do not walk up to people and talk to strangers all the time. That the way you show up on stage, Susan Kane, whose talk is about being an introvert, her TED talk has been seen by more than almost any other. She showed up with energy for that group and then went back to being who she needed and wanted to be off the clock. So what it is to be a professional is not, oh, I'm a surgeon, I feel like cutting people open.

I like that, it's I can do my work and be of service and save lives, and then I can get out of the operating room and go to the next thing. So if you're not eager to glad hand people and make a commotion, that's great. You might be a fantastic marketer. You just don't have to spend your time doing things like slapping people on the back. That's a myth. So the way that our firm has been built up, so we're in the wealth management space. You don't know anything about us, but we've built our whole firm on, I guess, I like the way you put it. We call it content.

You call it teaching. And so we've put our thoughts out into the world because the financial services is a trust-based business, right? There's no good that we're producing. We're not manufacturing something. We're giving a service to people that want or need it. And so we've done, our whole firm is based on, we have no sales or marketing team, right,

that like a normal firm would have. We write blog posts where we provide contact, and we answer people's questions. We do podcasts like this. We have people go on TV to talk about it, and we're not predicting the stock market is going to be here next week. We're trying to provide context for people long-term thinking and give people sane advice when there's often an insane amount of stuff that comes out of the financial services industry. And so we've built this firm on the back of it, and we have a dozen people probably who are constantly trying to put their thoughts out into the world. And so we get questions all the time from other financial advisors

and wealth managers saying, I want to produce content like you guys do. I want to, what do do? And the funny thing is, is a lot of them are trying to build an audience. How do I build an audience? Right. And my first advice is usually, don't build an audience, answer questions for people. So I'm just curious what advice you have for people in the services industry that are trying to build trust. What's the best way to do that when you have all these different avenues to explore now in ways to get information out to people? Okay. So now we need to talk about systems. And it's, you know, Animal Spirits is a pretty fantastic name for a podcast, but spontaneous optimism would have been an even better one.

Well, I like it. From the same quote from Keynes. And spontaneous optimism helps us see that human beings at their best are not Mr. Spock. Human beings at their best are looking for threads of trust and connection and interest and delight and grabbing them. And over time, we weave those threads together into our lives, but we're not sitting here looking at the last basis point. So when someone wants to show up with information, whatever, we need to begin with who's it for and what's it for. What is the change you seek to make? And if you do it selfishly, which is, ah, my boss says I got to get my name out

there. How am I going to hustle to get an audience? You're going to give yourself away. immediately, right? And manipulating people doesn't help you get anywhere because in this world you need to be at it for more than a few weeks. Otherwise, you know, you're running FTX. And so what we're seeking to do instead is say, there are people. They're not my audience. There are just people. How can I arrive for a group of people within a system, a media system, a financial ecosystem where they would miss me if I were gone. And so a specific example, it turns out I didn't know this, that the people who install swimming pools sometimes are a little shady.

Every industry has people like that, but the swimming pool industry apparently had more than normal. And this guy started a podcast, a blog, started a blog 20 years ago. And all he did was reveal every single secret of the bad guys in his industry. every single scam, every come on, every bait and switch. Each blog post just did it bit by bit. And his shadier peers were not happy with this. But anyone who was searching for insight in the pre-chat GPT world

about buying a swimming pool sooner or later ended up at his blog. And the question then is, if you lived in wherever Pennsylvania and you needed a swimming pool, who are you going to hire to put it in right well it's pretty clear the person who just told you how all the shady people do their job so there are niches upon niches upon niches where you can show up and not say how do I selfishly get attention but show up and say where are the people who need a tour guide and what can I show them that I have expertise about not to manipulate them but to service to be of help I love it there's a sold saying that no one goes to church looking for an 11th commandment

every week, right? It's the evergreen stuff that matters, right? So I'm curious where you stand on going back to old material over and over again and driving home important points and maybe telling it in a different way, because that's what I feel like with investing. There's not, no one's making up new ways of investing correctly these days. It's the, it's driving home, the stuff that really matters that everyone kind of already knows, just telling it in a different way. Okay, so now we're getting back to this spontaneous optimism animal spirits thing. There's a between knowing it and doing it. And, you know, the TLDR culture of too long didn't read, mindless clicking on the internet isn't going away. It's getting worse. And people who have a body

of work that is consistent and useful have to resist that temptation of, oh, here's the new flavor. So I would say, for example, my blog is 9,000 posts so far in a row. And I've probably only blogged about 50 different things. And there are lots and lots of ways to look at these 50 different things. The same way everyone eats every day, but there's a lot of food in the world. And different flavors of food are interesting, but they're still basically the same foods. So human beings are looking for a new way in to basically distract them from the things that are distracting them so they can get back to what they should be doing. And consistency isn't

boring, not if you're good at it. You've been writing books for a while. First book was in the early 90s, I want to say, or is that wrong? Well, I was a book packager. So my first book was in 1986, business rules with thumb. I think there was a Warren Buffett quote in it. And I did 120 books, sometimes with my name, sometimes with other people's names. I did the Stanley Kaplan Test Prep Books, the Business Almanac, books with Jay Levinson. And then I became a quote author in 1999 with permission marketing. So I was 25 years ago. So I'm curious, you said you haven't been on a plane in a while, so maybe you like this better.

But I'm curious what you think of the podcasting tour like this when you're trying to market a new book. Is it better than the previous iteration of trying to get out there and do a book tour? Do you look it better? Or is it just different? When you find an extraordinary host like Ben and you're able to talk to him like a person, what could be better than that? I could do that all day long. Sometimes you talk to people who think they have to have a podcast but are afraid of having a podcast or don't want to put in the work to do a podcast.

And that's hard because then you're doing two people's job at the same time. That's happening less and less because even though anyone can have a podcast, everyone doesn't have a podcast because the people who were just hacking at it mostly have stopped. I don't miss being on airplanes one bit. I do miss the weird serendipity that comes from being in the right place at the right time. We could have a four-hour podcast about the technique of marketing and promoting a book because that has changed a lot and most people have no clue how to do it and they never did have a clue how to do it.

And so it leads to a lot of frustration. We don't need to get totally into this, but I'm one of these people. So I'm not, again, not nearly as prolific as you have written four books in my day. about investing in behavioral psychology. And I have a great idea for a new book. It's my favorite idea of any book that I've, and you mentioned, like sometimes you just have to write it. And I did the outline, I did all the chapters together,

I'm probably 60% of the way there. And I've never dealt with procrastination in my life. It's never been a problem for me, being a procrastinator. For whatever reason, I'm procrastinating on finishing this book, and I can't get myself to get over the hump. And honestly, I think one of the reasons is I, I love the process of writing. I don't like the process of doing this self-promotion for a book.

That's the part that scares me. I'm just, again, back to the introvert thing, that's not who I am. And I know you have to put yourself out there to do this. Do you ever get this, not like writer's block, but do you ever get that thing where you get kind of hung up on something like this? Well, first, congratulations on having the best idea you've had. Second, congratulations on caring enough about it that you're feeling resistant. which is what my friend Steve Pressfield calls it.

So I wrote a book about this called The Practice. Steve's book about it is called War of Art. For anybody who's confronting a challenge, I recommend both of those books. Here's the thing. The act of publishing a book is difficult and becoming less and less attractive. The book industry after 500 years is dying and it's dying fast. More books are being published than ever before by a factor of 40. The typical laydown for a book from a New York publisher has gone from 20,000 books printed

and distributed the first week, average, to 175. Think about that, right? And so what I say to people who have a book that they love to write is write the book and just give it away. Write the book, make it a PDF and post it. If it's great, it'll spread. If it spreads, it will pay dividends. If it's not great, it won't spread, and no one will know.

But you don't have to go through the public display of confidence and conversation to persuade people who don't buy books to buy a book because you already have an audience. You already have people who trust you and give you the benefit of the doubt. It's enough. And the idea that you have to please your publisher, that's sort of old-fashioned. Yes. That is one of my hang-ups is I've never had a good experience of any of these books with that process, with a publisher. Right. There's constantly people turning over and the people who published my books in the past have left. I notice you use this new publisher, what is it, author's equity? So is that just, is that a new way of doing things? To be honest, that was a new, new one to me. Yeah, I'm their first official book. And it's run by some extraordinary people, one of whom used to be the president of Penguin books. And they don't pay advances. They have a radically different model. But mostly,

They're my team. I don't feel like they're my customer. I'm doing nothing to make sure they're happy. I'm doing things to make sure my readers are happy. Like I made this collectible chocolate bar. What other publisher says, yeah, sure, go ahead and make a collectible chocolate bar? So for me, the craft of this is how do you create an artifact that 10 years from now, someone's going to bump into and say, I'm really glad you wrote that. And they're going to talk about something in the book. you don't even remember writing. And, you know, that's the magic of this medium, is it sticks around. So we have to raise the stakes to write something that's worth sticking around.

All right, let's talk strategy. So you talk about how strategy is not like a goal, it's not a list of tasks. It's like this urgent versus important kind of thing. It's like the choices we make. So as an investing guy, I view your definition of strategy a lot like an investment plan or investing philosophy because people always say, like, what should I invest my money in? And the whole point is you can't invest your money without a plan. It's like a portfolio is not the same thing as a plan.

Correct. Your funds and your securities and your stocks and bonds that you hold, that's not a plan. A plan is the, what am I going to do in the decisions that I make? Is that a fair to way to describe your definition of strategy? Yes. And great financial planners are strategic and mediocre financial planners are tactical. Yes, exactly right. I love it.

And I love how you talk about the difference between like getting the big things right versus the details. In one of the other books, you talk about someone had a chance to ask Stephen King a question about writing and they said, what kind of pencil do you use? It's kind of like you're starting a business and it's like what kind of business cards should I have? I guess the problem is I'm constantly preaching the virtues of long term investing and staying the course and being a long term, thinking and acting for the long term. And one of the things that people always said in the finance industry is just ignore the noise, right? the short run stuff, just ignore it. And I think it's never been harder to do that because the noise is ever. It's a fire hose.

We've all, so how do you, how do you do that in today's day and age where it's literally impossible to avoid the noise because it's sitting in your pocket every day? Okay, so the strategy of being a long-term investor says, I think that there is a system at work. It's been at work for over 100 years. And that system is productivity begets productivity. That system is that democracy begets democracy, that markets beget markets, and that if we strap in and lower our transactional costs and focus on a very long-term trend, we will come out

ahead. That is a strategy. There's another strategy that says, you know, D.E. Shaw's house is just down the street from me, and it's this extraordinarily large, ridiculous thing. And his strategy is, there are all these discontinuities in the market, but they only last a second or half a second, and my entire model is going to be to take advantage. So those are totally different strategies. Either one might be right, but you announce what it is.

And then the question is, what data are we going to incorporate to fuel our emotions and our attention? What they teach you in science class is what significant digits are. A doctor doesn't care if your temperature is 98.6 or 98.7. It doesn't matter. if it's 98.6 or 98.7. And more resolution of the tenth of a degree is not helpful. And that's why thermometers, even though they're digital, do not have more digits in them.

Not helpful. So, if you're going to be a professional about your personal finance, part of that work is don't read that stuff. Don't subscribe to Barron's. Don't get breaking news from any site that talks about. stocks. Don't invest in stocks that make a lot of noise because that is going to take you away from the strategy you signed up with in the first place. Right. Filters are more important than ever. Correct. I could have just said that in four words. So I love the fact that you

talk about how culture itself is essentially strategy, right? And for my firm, culture is a big thing. It's not only the people that we hire, we have this internal rule where when we're trying to bring someone in. If it's not an obvious yes, it's a no, right? And it's the people that matter. And the same thing with our clients. We don't want to take on a client who wants us to do something that we can't or won't do, right? I want you to pick penny stocks for me. If we bring you on as a client, you're going to waste our time and we're going to waste yours. It's the whole thing. So how much do you think about the difference between people and then, you know, strategy the way that people normally think about it? Like, what's more important? Is it all just

kind of intermingled there? Okay. So what's culture? Culture is people like us do things like this. and where does culture come from? Culture is invented by systems to defend themselves. So the wedding industrial complex has invented a culture about how much you're supposed to spend on a wedding ring and how much you're supposed to spend on flowers and that you should serve steak and salmon. This is all invented as normal to defend the system.

And useful, successful institutions have a culture. What is it like around here? How do people make decisions? Who do they need to ask? and what can they do without asking? And if you wait for it to arrive accidentally, you'll end up with something that's mediocre and toxic because human beings at work have so many pressures on them

that they will inevitably race to the bottom. And so part of what you're talking about is building a culture that is resilient enough that you don't have to watch everybody doing everything all the time and that you don't have to spend a lot of time arguing with your customers. And so, you know, Warren Buffett's secret is not a secret. His secret has only two parts to it. One, he intentionally built a culture and a strategy.

And two, he's done it longer than anybody else. If you do those two things, you are quite likely to come out ahead. When I first started my blog, I think I kind of accidentally backed into a strategy of who my audience would be because when I first started writing it, I was just, I'm a nobody. And I was writing it for friends and family. I was sick of them asking me questions. And so I decided, I'm just going to start this blog. and for my father-in-law and, you know, my mother who always asked me, like, what, what is the

stock market doing? Where is it going next? I'm going to answer their question. So I put it in as plain English because I'm, you know, I'm the investment guy for them. And so I put it in as plain English as I could talk about. And I realized within the first six months or so I was emails from financial advisors saying, and I was not in the financial advisor space at this time. I'm managing money for institutional portfolios. And so I'm, I'm totally oblivious of the wealth management space. And all these advisors are emailing me saying, hey, I like, I the fact that you put it into plain English because my clients are also not finance people. They can understand it. Can I use your blog and share it with them? I said, of course, I don't

care. That's the whole point of it. I want to put it out there. And so I didn't have this grand plan in my mind of I'm going to put this stuff in plain English so people can understand it better. It was, this is my audience. So I'm curious how you define your audience? Because this does not strike me as a book that is meant for MBAs or CEOs or anything like that. It could be, but it's also probably cast a wider net. So how do you, do you have any thought process of that going into a project like this, of defining your audience? Okay, first, the name of your next book is I'm sick and tired of answering your questions.

I'm very clear about who my audience is, and that's a key part that I talk about in the book. Who exactly is it for? The same way you talked about, who exactly is your firm for. But it's almost always a mistake to judge your audience by what they look like from the outside. by their height or their income or their race or their background, none of that is important. What's important is what do they believe? What do they dream of? What do they wish for and think about? What are they afraid of? So my audience are people who, A, are curious and eager to

satisfy their curiosity, B, seek to make a change in the world and aren't willing to just be a compliant cog in the system. And C, get satisfaction from telling their friends. And so like you, my blog started with 10 readers. And I have never promoted it. It has gotten to where it has gotten because I write blog posts so that people will share them. Because what happens is I'm telling my reader something they probably already know, but I do it in a way that if they send it to their friends, their status will go up because they're helping their friends decode something. And so when I did the book Purple Cow, the first 5,000 copies were in a milk carton. And the people who bought it kept the milk carton on their desk.

But they didn't do it because they were promoting me. They did it because they were promoting themselves because if their boss saw the milk carton, a conversation would happen about it, and then their job would get better. All right. So at the end of the book, we'll finish with this. You write how you gave thanks to an AILM name Claude, which I'd never done before. So I checked it out. And I have to admit, I'm kind of torn on AI interacting with creativity.

On the one hand, I want the Scarlett Johansson, her assistant in my ear all the time. That's my whole dream with AI. If I just get the AI assistant in my ear that can help me become more efficient, that's great. But I also love the process of thinking for myself. So I'm curious how you handle that struggle of using the AI to, better your process, but also still having your own process yourself and thinking through because that's one of my favorite things about writing is I think writing is thinking. It's just a way organizing your thoughts. So how do you view AI in that construct? So I wrote every word of the book.

I wrote every word in my blog. But and you just said, I like thinking for myself. You have never thought for yourself, not one day. You have inherited thousands of years. You have inherited thousands of years of culture. Every book you've read, every interaction you've had, all of it was done by somebody else, and you have interpreted it to become you. So, Claude, if you use it properly, is a librarian. I will upload a, you know, six of us who had a 40-page business plan over the course of five months. I uploaded it to Claude, and I said, please analyze this business plan, highlight the contradictions, and ask 10 hard questions about it. And in less than a minute, me an MBA quality analysis. Clearly, we're all better off because I asked it that question,

right? So if I say to Claude, I just came up with a list of six system traps, six things that can happen where systems create negative effects. Did I miss any? And it will say, here are five you missed. And it turns out that three of them are junk, but two, two were mind-blowing. Well, that's not cheating. That's the work. And so it makes me think better because finally, I have a tireless assistant who will challenge me without ego. I like that. Because when I write a book, I send it off to four or five people I trust and I say, what did I miss? Or what can I take out? And that's the whole point. I like how you ask it to ask questions. All right. The book is called This is a strategy, make better plans. By the time this comes out, the book will be out. I love it. I love the format. I love the diversity of diversification of content. I read the entire thing in a single day. Such an easy read. Anything else you want to promote here? I guess you said you don't promote your blog, but I will promote it. Seth's blog. I read it every day. Thanks for coming on, Seth. This was a pleasure. Well, Ben, I appreciate the time. The one thing I want to promote is simple. If the work you're

doing is important, find somebody else, commit to each other to meet once a week for two months to tell each other about your strategy. Because if you know that every Thursday, you've got to get it on a with Ben and say, hey, these are the decisions I made this week, you're going to make better decisions. That's why I wrote the book, to have the conversations. I love it. Thanks, Seth. Thanks, Ben.